Prep Baseball: NUIC West’s lucky ‘lefties’ pull away from East

FREEPORT — Devin Pax started a trend Saturday afternoon in the ninth inning of the NUIC Senior All-Star Baseball Game.

The Warren/Stockton infielder decided he’d bat left-handed and legged out a single on a dribbler to third.

The West scored six runs in the ninth, more than it scored in any other inning, with the majority of the lineup batting as lefties as the team beat the East, 13-3.

“We just decided to do it,” Pax said. “It was our last time batting, so why not do it?

“It felt pretty good.”

It didn’t look very good as the ball was hit with very little power. Still, it wasn’t too bad considering it was Pax’s first time batting left.

“I’ve done it in the cage a couple of times so it wasn’t too hard to adjust,” Pax said.

Pax may have had a bit of extra motivation to get on base, as West manager and longtime Warren/Stockton coach Jim Nielsen was unaware of Pax’s intentions.

“I was scared Coach Nielsen was going to yell at me,” Pax said. “But it was all right.”

“They were having fun,” Nielsen said. “Some of those hits turned out to be just late swings and they were able to beat it out. But the first five or six innings, we were going to play it straight up.”

The West scored five runs against the East in the first inning, then scored a run in the fourth and sixth innings. The East tried to make a game of it, trailing 7-1 going into the bottom of the sixth before Milledgeville’s Kameron DawTyne RBI single and an error produced two runs.

The West went scoreless the next two innings before Pax’s two-out single on Milledgeville pitcher Zach Herin set up East Dubuque’s Tyler Hilby’s RBI single for an 8-3 lead. Lena-Winslow catcher Jon Stockton, batting traditionally right-handed, drilled a two-run triple and sent Pax home for a 10-3 score.

Colton Janssen, traditional lefty, brought home another run before Ben Moest hit a left-handed single for the West’s final run of the game.

“I’ve never even practiced that before,” Moest said. “That was luck.

“I kept wanting to put my hands where I put them when I hit right-handed in the box, it felt really awkward. I just took a swing and it was luck.”

Both the East and West juggled lineups and positions of the field throughout the game to get everyone a chance to bat.

“We just put our (all-conference) first-teamers up there first and everyone else just filled in,” Forreston and East coach Kyle Zick said. “We had 14 kids here and batted everyone in order.

“We had free substitutions, so I just told them they can go wherever they want. They had fun with it and that’s all the matters. It was an honor to coach them.”

Nielsen added: “We ended up with 18 guys, so instead of going with substitutions, we just went with two teams (and lineups). But this was a heck of a group to be around and everybody just mixed well together. It was a good day.”